Cultural innovation: Passion drives new wave of video producers

Francois Marchand, Vancouver Sun08.29.2014

Josh Huculiak, Joe Schweers and Andy Huculiak, left to right, the team behind the video production outfit Amazing Factory. In recent years, Amazing Factory has been on the cutting edge of film and video production in Vancouver.

Or ask Vancouver video production outfit Amazing Factory, a group that has been at the forefront of the city’s digital video revolution in the past five years.

The team — brothers Josh and Andy Huculiak and their cousins Joe and Amanda Schweers — has produced over 50 music videos since forming Amazing Factory in 2007.

“Gear has been there for a while — now it’s just about ambition,” Joe Schweers said in a recent interview at the family gang’s house off Commercial Drive. “It’s about deciding, ‘Yes I can do it,’ and believing in that.”

Amazing Factory’s first projects were all about the family unit: The production outfit was born from the need to create videos for Andy Huculiak’s band We Are The City, a progressive Vancouver pop-rock trio.

Joe’s training at Burnaby’s Art Institute and Josh’s completion of a one-year program at Vancouver Film School (both circa 2006-07) were all that was needed. Well, that and some rudimentary equipment, including a now-defunct standard-definition Panasonic DVX-100 camera and an unreliable tripod.

Over the years, as high definition video became the standard, Amazing Factory evolved, and the quality of their products improved as equipment costs went down. The crew now uses a Sony FS-700 and Mac workstations, but they still produce the videos on the fly, and the editing all happens on the top floor of their house.

From relative obscurity as a music video production outfit, the company recently found its way to the Cannes Film Festival to showcase its first feature film, Violent.

The movie, produced for a meagre $300,000, is a meditative Norwegian language film (shot in Norway) about a woman living through a catastrophic event. The film acts as a companion to We Are The City’s latest album of the same name, but the film features none of the band’s songs. Instead, it uses atmospheric bits and audio outtakes from the recording sessions for its soundtrack.

Violent serves as 24-year-old Andy Huculiak’s directorial debut (all family members in the video group are in their mid-20s) and was presented at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. As part of the Perspective Canada showcase at the festival’s Marché Du Film alongside films by celebrated Canadian directors Xavier Dolan (Mommy) and Atom Egoyan (The Captive), Violent generated some serious buzz.

Violent will be shown at the San Sebastian Film Festival in September (“where they premiered Star Wars,” Andy Huculiak exclaimed) and at the Vancouver International Film Festival, where the movie will get its Canadian premiere.

Success didn’t come overnight for Amazing Factory, and the core of their business remains the music video.

The team has produced videos for Vancouver indie favourites Hey Ocean! (Big Blue Wave) and Said the Whale (Loveless) and a session with beloved slam poet Shane Koyczan that now boast over 500,000 views each on YouTube.

Some of their wilder technical achievements include creating a spinning room in We Are The City’s mind-bending video for Friends Hurt, where the band’s three members bounce against the walls as they perform their song.

The idea was something they found on the Internet, where someone bragged they could create the effect for $300. The video ended up costing $10,000 to produce, and it was shot in a freezing warehouse with no proper supervision save for a trained forklift operator, with friends helping spin the makeshift room by hand.

In an era where music videos have a short shelf life on the web, Amazing Factory’s labour-intensive work is done for the sake of art.

“The fact that a band comes to us and they have this thing they’ve worked on for so long and have put so much into, and they ask us to make the visual partner to it, it’s very exciting,” Joe Schweers said. “To land what we’ve been doing for the past eight years to that song is always something we wanted to do. The fact we get the opportunity to try things and push ourselves and make a piece of art, that’s always been our goal.”

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Cultural innovation: Passion drives new wave of video producers

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